Sweepstakes: Give the Old Lady a New LookWritten by Dinko Bacun
The sweepstakes is an old marketing tool everybody is using. If you need to introduce a new product, or you need to give your sales a boost, you use sweepstakes. Usually, you will have a drawing from pool of your buyers, and each week, or month, you will draw some winners, either by some computer algorithm or hand of some beautiful or famous person. The problem with sweepstakes concept is that everybody is using it, so that a particular sweepstakes promo gets indistinguishable, and participant knows, from previous experience, that his/her chance of winning are slim. Lottery type drawing is impersonal, it has no content, and always leaves taste of possible fraud with people who didn't win. The main object of sweepstakes, which is to bring more buyers, is thus losing its power in web marketing. On web everybody is talking about content and learning experience, so, for our 10th anniversary we thought of giving old lady a new look. Being IT developers, we knew we had to give participants a better chance to win, while still be in range of acceptability for us. We understood that chance for a participant to win should be bigger at beginning, so that it should nudge him to participate (buy our product) early. In mathematical terms, we should be using such a DISTRIBUTION, which will give participant a big chance to win early, while still giving a fair chance of wining later on. We decided on prime numbers distribution, mostly because of a catchy name, i.e. we could say that our sweepstakes were "primed". The distribution would be implemented in such a way that every buyer would get an unique, sequential ID number, when he buys. If his ID number is a prime number, he wins sweepstakes. The distribution of wins is really appealing to participant: 54% chance of winning in first 11 buyers 45% in first 20 26% in first 100 16.9% in first 1000 12.3% in first 10000 So, for any sales over 100, we would be in regular range of standard 25% opening discount everybody gives away. On other hand, even if participant isn't among first 100 buyers, he stands a fair chance to win because even high numbers like 9923, 9929 and 9931 are primes. More importantly, participant has a feeling he can control wining because he can increase his chances if he buys early, which is, of course, main purpose of sweepstakes. We designed a page ( http://www.CarpioHelpdesk.com ) and showed it to some of our friends, and we were surprised to learn that most of them didn't really know what prime numbers were, and felt we were feeding them some kind of "get $90,000 in 14 hours flat" scheme. We then realized we were on Net, and that we should add "content" to our sweepstakes, participants should be able to learn something new, should learn about importance of prime numbers in computer industry. So, what's so important about prime numbers? K.F. GAUSS, one of fathers of modern mathematics, in his Distquisitines Arithmeticae, Art. 329(1801) says that distinguishing prime numbers from composites (non prime) is one of most important and useful problems in whole of arithmetics. Donald E. Knuth, one of fathers of computer programming, calls prime numbers "somewhat MYSTERIOUS" and
| | Basics of Internet MarketingWritten by Dale Clark
Part Time or Full Time?That's not really question you need to ask yourself. The main question really is: Do you have Time? You've got to ask yourself if you have time to put into a home business. Time is your most precious asset and you have to prioritize it. What kind of a commitment can you make? Only you can decide what's important to you and whether or not you can devote your energies into developing your business. Believe me it will take a lot of your time and energy to do that! Yes that's right it takes time! You are Not going to build your home business overnight. You are Not going to get 'Rich Overnight'! Don't fall for that hype! It takes a commitment to succeed in any business. You're going to have to work it. It's Not Easy, as some of scammers will tell you. No One is going to build your business for you! You have to build your business with your efforts, your time. Are you willing to sacrifice some of your free Time? That's question you have got to ask yourself before you ever consider starting a home business. You'd better stick with traditional J-O-B if you're not willing to sacrifice some of your free time. OK, I know you've been told that network marketing, MLM, or any business from home will create a time freedom, But truth is it takes a lot of work and effort to build your business to that level. It's not going to happen suddenly!
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